As a researcher exploring the ethical and political implications of digital platforms and big data, I’m sympathetic to the bill’s ambition of increasing transparency and empowering users. However, estimating the value of user data isn’t simple and won’t, I believe, solve privacy issues.

In other words, big data contains the mundane yet intimate moments of people’s lives. And, if Facebook captures your interactions with friends and family, Google your late night searches, and Alexa your living room commands, wouldn’t you want to know, as the bill suggests, what your “data is worth and to whom it is sold”?

Sadly, the DASHBOARD Act doesn’t specify how it would estimate the value of user data. Instead, it explains that the Securities and Exchange Commission, an independent federal government agency, “shall develop a method or methods for calculating the value of user data.” The commission, I believe, will quickly realize that estimating the value of user data is a challenging undertaking.

Such predictive ability means that private information isn’t just contained in user data. Companies can also infer your private information, based on statistical correlations in the data of a number of users. How can the value of such data be reduced to an individual dollar value? It is more than the sum of its parts.

What’s more, this ability to use statistical analysis to identify people as belonging to a group category can have far-reaching privacy implications. If service providers can use predictive analytics to guess a user’s sexual orientation, race, gender and religious belief, what is to stop them from discriminating on that basis?

Having been let loose, predictive technologies will continue to work even if users delete their part of the data that helped create them.

Control through data

The sensitivity of data depends not just on what it contains, but on how governments and companies can use it to exert influence.

This is evident in my current research on China’s planned social credit system. The Chinese government plans to use national databases and “trustworthiness ratings” to regulate the behavior of Chinese citizens.

In light of such inequality how could a numerical value ever capture the “true” value of user data?

The proposed legislations’s lack of specificity is disconcerting. However, even more troubling might be its insistence that data transparency will be achieved by revealing monetary value alone. Numeric assessments of financial worth don’t reflect data’s power to predict our actions or guide our decisions.

The DASHBOARD Act aims to make the business of data more transparent and empower users. However, I believe that it will fail to fulfill this promise. If lawmakers want to tackle data privacy, they need to regulate not just data monetization, but more widely address the value and cost of data in people’s lives.